“Then a bad man,” said Henry, “is one who is behind his times, or else ahead of them.”
“Oh, no,” they protested, “not ahead of them!”
“No,” I answered, “but the man ahead of his time, who is better than his time, may appear to be a criminal. You must see that the man who believes in the eternal good, who knows that he is going toward unity and complete love, is in a sense above the human law, and must discover his own laws. He may be a criminal in the eyes of others.”
“Jesus is one example. He was crucified as a criminal.”
“Because,” said Henry, “he broke the Roman law. He refused to worship their images, and he called himself King of the Jews.”
“And they did not know,” I answered, “in what sense he called himself King, so they had to crucify him as a traitor. Can’t you think of some other example? Of course, there were all the heretics of old times.”
Alfred and Henry said that Roosevelt was in a sense an example, because he had been much blamed for exposing the truth and hurting business; but that the hurt was an essential part of progress and good.
Ruth said: “Surely it is better to expose the truth and suffer for it, than to go on in falsehood.”
I gave as another example the Russians, with whom, a short time ago, it was a crime to educate the peasants; and I told how brave men and women had been sent to Siberia for breaking the law in this respect.
“But,” I said, “this is a dangerous subject, and truly, we ought not to have mentioned it until we could probe it to the bottom. For surely in a democratic state one of the essential inner laws is that we shall obey the law which our fellows have made.”
“If a law seems wrong to a man,” said Henry, “he can try to change it, but meantime he must obey it. For instance, a man might believe in free trade, but still he would have no right to smuggle in goods.”
“One ought to obey school-laws, I suppose,” said Marian.
“Surely,” I answered, “for the school is an institution you enter from choice, and if you don’t like the laws you can protest by leaving. But if there were a law unjust to your fellows, you would disobey it. Still, even then, the best way to protest would be by a strike of the students.”
They had a long discussion on the great crime of whispering in school, in which I scarcely joined, as I refuse to be a petty preacher to them. But I tried to explain to them why it was so hard for them to obey these little laws.